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Multiple Experts Try Defining "Cloud Computing"
jg21 writes "Even though IBM's Irving Wladawsky Berger reports a leading analyst as having said recently that 'There is a clear consensus that there is no real consensus on what cloud computing is,' here are no fewer than twenty attempts at a definition of the infrastructural paradigm shift that is sweeping across the Enterprise IT world — some of them really quite good. From the article: 'Cloud computing is...the user-friendly version of grid computing.' (Trevor Doerksen) and 'Cloud computing really is accessing resources and services needed to perform functions with dynamically changing needs. An application or service developer requests access from the cloud rather than a specific endpoint or named resource.' (Kevin Hartig)"
What is Cloud Computing - Video
Summary -
"At the Web 2.0 Expo, we asked Tim O'Reilly, Dan Farber, Matt Mullenweg, Jay Cross, Brian Solis, Kevin Marks, Steve Gillmor, Jeremy Tanner, Maggie Fox, Tom McGovern, Sam Lawrence, Stowe Boyd, David Tebbutt, Dave McClure, Chris Carfi, Vamshi Krishna and Rod Boothby the same question: "What is Cloud Computing?". Here's what we got. (more)"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6PNuQHUiV3Q
At least the name does not pretend to be clear.
My pet definition is resources that can be allocated to different departments, divisions, and users as needed rather than the "box-per-department" model that is common now. In other words, as-needed allocation.
Table-ized A.I.
It's interesting that a fairly large number of these guys refer to the term itself as a buzz word.
I think cloud computing is less of a buzz word than most, but I really think that most of these definitions miss the biggest difference: With cloud computing you outsource *all* your hardware. So, any application where you are not physically talking about what software runs on which piece of hardware is cloud computing to me.
MP3 Search Engine
why mod this a troll ? He's quite right actually, there have been quite a few instances of virtualization and scaleable computing facilities in the last 20 years. Think transputers, thinking machines and some even older.
The only difference between then and now is the level of ease-of-deployment. Basically anybody can do it now, whereas in the past you'd have to have a pretty serious budget.
MP3 Search Engine
Cloud computing refers to a cluster computing environment hosted by a single company. This approach is also referred to as "utility computing," and back around 1999 or so, the companies providing these services used to be called "application service providers."
The difference between cloud computing and grid computing, which was all the rage around 2000 (see the academic Globus project) is that grid computing aggregates *widely* heterogeneous computers under different authorities across Internet-scale wide-area networks. A common approach is aggregating universities' computers to form a large-scale cluster. Disadvantages include the fact that you had to program with MPI, communication latencies are high, and there were a lot of authentication issues.
Cloud computing avoids these difficult issues by having a single company host these services for you, and it's typically being done by the big players who can afford to do so (Amazon, Microsoft, Google). Cluster farms are controlled in data centres under one authority. The programmatic interface is simpler, and computation is typically through a fixed paradigm like MapReduce, although there are known SQL-like approaches to run on clusters. Communication through a GigEthernet is typical in a cluster within a data centre.
Is cloud computing a buzzword? Possibly, but then "multi-core," "data centre," and "XML" used to be buzzwords too. Within five years, doing development on a particular vendor's cloud computing infrastructure may be as viable a (specialised) skill as programming for Windows, Linux, or MacOS.
Cloud computing is a buzzword referring to an environment in which all of your enterprise's data and communications resides in another company's servers. The perceived benefit is that your enterprise does not need to have any of its own servers, and thus your IT department does not need to have any engineers.
IT managers love the concept of cloud computing, as the entire IT budget (beyond what is paid to the company that provided the cloud servers) can be used for salaries and perks for IT managers and their cronies.
Because of this aspect of cloud computing, the companies that provide cloud services try to make their perceived cash costs as low as possible (e.g., "free email servers"), and obtain their revenue stream through other means. These other means commonly include advertising to the users of the cloud servers (who constitute a captive audience) and data-mining what should be the enterprise's confidential intellectual property.
Cloud computing service providers are often multinationals, meaning that the data may end up residing in a different country with very different privacy and data confidentiality laws.
As of 2008, the problem of loss of control over intellectual property and the risk of foreign storage is not generally recognized. The small number of engineers and privacy advocates who sound the alarm are regularly dismissed as cranks who are bitter at being laid off.
Maybe in the IT world but in the electronics world (at least in the UK) its still taught as micros. 6502 assembly is used quite extensively in teaching still here. Civilian industry may like Java and so on but those of us working in systems that require proven reliablity and standards conformity still need to know it.
A thistle is a fat salad for an ass's mouth...